Research Article Investigations on Structural, Mechanical, and Dielectric Properties of PVDF/Ceramic Composites Anshuman Srivastava, 1 Karun Kumar Jana, 2 Pralay Maiti, 2 Devendra Kumar, 1 and Om Parkash 1 1 Department of Ceramic Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi 221005, India 2 School of Material Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi 221005, India Correspondence should be addressed to Om Parkash; oprakash.cer@itbhu.ac.in Received 29 August 2014; Revised 17 December 2014; Accepted 18 December 2014 Academic Editor: H. P. S. Abdul Khalil Copyright © 2015 Anshuman Srivastava et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Polymer ceramic composites are widely used for embedded capacitor application. In the present work PVDF has been used as a matrix and CCTO and LaCCTO have been used as reinforcement. Extrusion process has been used for the synthesis of composites. X-ray difraction (XRD) patterns confrm the formation of single phase CCTO, and LaCCTO in its pure as well as composite state. It is found that La doping in CCTO considerably increases the dielectric constant and reduces the dielectric loss. A similar trend is observed in the composites with the increasing content of CCTO and LaCCTO. 1. Introduction Recently, polymer ceramic composites have attracted a lot of interest in industrial applications because of dramatic improvement that can be made in their properties by vary- ing the type and amount of dispersion. Modern electronic devices demand new high dielectric constant materials with low dielectric loss and enhanced dielectric strength [1–3]. Tese materials should fulfll the industrial need of suitable dielectric properties, improved mechanical strength, and ease of processing at a relative low cost. Polymer ceramic composites can be used in various applications including integrated capacitors, acoustic emission sensors, smart skins, and leakage current controllers [1–4]. Te possibility of developing composites by incorpo- rating ferroelectric ceramics in polymer matrix has been investigated by many workers. Incorporation of ferroelectric ceramic (such as barium titanate, Pb(Mg 1/3 Nb 2/3 )O 3 PbTiO 3 , and PMN-PT) has been studied by many researchers [5– 12]. Ferroelectric materials undergo phase transition at a characteristic temperature, known as Curie temperature. Piezoelectric materials and polar oxides exhibit low structural symmetry. Another drawback with these composites is that even at very high content of reinforcement dielectric constant does not become more than 50 [13–17]. As compared to ferroelectric materials, CCTO has advan- tage from the application point of view in electronic devices such as capacitors, dynamic random access memories, varis- tors, and thermistors. CaCu 3 Ti 4 O 12 has a distorted and complex cubic perovskite-like structure with large unit cell (∼7.4 ˚ A) and its dielectric constant remains unchanged over a wide range of frequencies and temperatures [18–20]. So many theories have been proposed to explain the abnormal dielectric properties of CCTO. Among the various explana- tions, the internal barrier layer capacitance mechanism has been widely accepted [21]. According to the IBLC model, CCTO ceramic can be considered as a composite material consisting of the semiconducting grains and the insulating grain boundaries. Grains possess small resistivity and the insulating grain boundaries possess giant resistivity. Grain boundary inhibits the fow of electrons in grain and causes a large boundary polarization which results in the giant dielectric constant. Poly(vinylidene fuoride) (PVDF) is a chemically, ther- mally, and mechanically very stable material. It has excellent ferroelectric, pyroelectric, and piezoelectric properties [22– 24]. Dielectric constant of more than 610 at 10 2 Hz at room temperature in CCTO/P(VDF-TrFE) when the fller volume is 50% was reported by Arbatti et al. [22]. Yang et al. studied Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Engineering Volume 2015, Article ID 205490, 9 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/205490